So Much Pretty (3 page)

I drove back to my apartment that day knowing where I really lived, and knowing I’d never be able to write about it for a tiny local. I was excited. I figured I’d be able to pitch this ghost-town U.S.A. story pretty widely. Wendy had yet to disappear. Piper had yet to become a household name. And I was definitely frightened in a way I had never felt on Schiller Street. The valley below Haytes Road seemed to me a dangerous place to live.

Gene

HAEDEN, NY, 1997

S
HE WAS WEARING
black-and-white-striped tights and a large paper bag into which she’d cut holes for her arms and head and drawn a picture of a tree in green Magic Marker. She was folded at the knees, hanging from a low bar connected to yards of heavy rope, which was attached to the ceiling of the barn. Her hair hung down, almost brushed the floor. Her face was flushed with the blood running to her head. She smiled, and her tiny white teeth formed a frown. Beneath her was a pile of straw, around which several pairs of socks with sewn-on button eyes lay, staring up at the vast and empty space.

“Are you getting hungry?” Gene asked her. He was still standing in the wide square doorway. “There’s food in the house when you get done hanging. Uncle Ross is coming over for dinner. And I think he’s bringing someone you want to see.”

“Then we’ll need another trapeze,” Alice said. She smiled and stretched her arms out at her sides, then extended them forward and curled up to hold the bar with her hands.

“I could not agree more,” Gene said. “One trapeze is hardly enough.”

She pulled herself into a sitting position, then grabbed the sides of the rope so she could perch in her stiff and crumpled bag. Her hair was so blond it was almost white. Her eyes were an icy translucent blue. Her skin was pale, but her cheeks were rosy from playing and hanging. The light dust of freckles that covered her cheeks and nose was invisible.

She was a strong four-year-old and had the aquiline features of her father. Had his muscles in miniature, his flexibility, his
distant dreamy face. He wondered sometimes if her skeleton looked like his.

He watched her swing. Watched her think as she looked up into the rafters. Her lips moved as she said something to herself he couldn’t hear.

“Well, legs,” Gene said, “I know you’re a tree today, but you might get hungry nevertheless. And there are some people who want to see you.”

Alice smiled wide at him but didn’t move. She was always hesitant to leave the barn, and he had to convince her.

“Somebody special, maybe,” Gene said.

“Someone like Theo?”

Gene nodded at her. She stood on the trapeze and began pumping her knees to swing, looking up at the ceiling. Gene looked, too.

Swallows glided, diving in arcs inside the barn. They flew with her. Their ragged nests, dark in the corners at the loft’s beam, like the straw bales below that she landed on from the trapeze. The place smelled wonderful. Like hay and rotten apples, grease and the faint musty odor of mold. She could swing very high because the rope was so long. She closed and opened her eyes quickly while she swung, he knew, to get a strobe effect from the sunlight shining through the slats.

Gene saw how she got lost in it, made herself dizzy, played at being upside down with her head raised to the ceiling, somehow claiming the entire space, claiming every direction, a seamless radius around herself.

“Jesus!” he said. “You are one brave girl. Ready to jump?” He held out his arms, clapped his hands. Then counted with every upswing. “One . . . two . . . three. HUP!”

Alice leaped from the trapeze, her legs bent and braced to land, her arms outstretched toward her father. The bag made a loud hollow crumpling sound as he caught her, and they both laughed. She had her mother’s dimple on the left cheek. Her eyes shone,
curved into little arcs, her blond eyebrows and eyelashes visible only when she was this close to him. Her body was strong and delicate in his arms, and he felt like he’d caught something wild.

He kissed her on the cheek and hoisted her to his shoulders, carried her out and along the long mowed path to the little farmhouse. Ross’s truck was parked in the driveway, and the doors were open. They could hear the old MC5 album, Claire’s favorite, playing on the five-dollar thrift-store turntable—a kid’s toy, really—the tiny speaker thumping and threatening to blow out.

Ross Miller was drinking from a brown bottle with a white label, sitting at the table with his five-year-old nephew Theo. Ross wore what Claire called his Libertarian Avenger Uniform: plain white T-shirt, Wrangler jeans, his VFW baseball cap with a little American flag pinned upside down across the front, and square BluBlocker sunglasses that wrapped around the sides of his head. He was a skinny man but strong and poised, with big straight white teeth. Nodded when he talked. Squinted and looked out of the corners of his eyes. He was known for long pained pauses in conversation in which he appeared to be considering whether or not it was worthwhile to go on speaking.

Ross was not related to the Pipers. He owned the house where Gene and Claire and Alice lived. He owned the barn and the fields and woods that lay between the Pipers’ house and the ramshackle compound he called home—a metal pole barn, a black and gray yurt built on an assortment of salvaged concrete blocks, and two gutted school buses, the one in which he slept retrofitted with an unfinished roof of partially shingled copper flashing and a chimney for the pellet stove.

The boy, Theo, was a tall lanky towhead one year older than Alice. His parents lived in Haeden but taught classics at the university in a neighboring town. Their commute and workload and social schedule often resulted in the boy spending several days a week with his Uncle Ross. During the two years that Gene and Claire had rented Ross’s house, the children had become inseparable.
There in the kitchen, Theo was fully engrossed in playing with two large rectangular magnets, making one repel the other across the table.

The fact was, the adults had become inseparable in many ways, too. For Gene and Claire, moving to Haeden instead of somewhere else upstate was simply a matter of who knew whom. In this case the whom was Ross, and the who was Gene’s best friend, Constant Souriani, who had introduced them. Constant was related to Ross by marriage and had visited Haeden often—first when his Aunt Hediya married the man and, later, on weekend trips after he moved to the States to attend NYU.

The house had been a dream for Gene and Claire, but apart from their friendship with Ross and their daughter’s love of Theo, the reality of living in a town this small was something they were only just beginning to feel. There were few people their age there. Young families were becoming less common than the middle-aged and older couples hanging on to the remains of land and buildings that had been willed to them. Not too many people moved to Haeden, and it was obvious that the Pipers’ newness would be new for as long as they lived there. Despite what Constant had told them about friendly small-town life, people did not warm up quickly to “outsiders.”

It seemed the place was closed to the idea of a wider world. So resistant that people would continue to use words like “farm,” “forest,” and “town” long after the words no longer fit the reality of the landscape. Haeden was being collectively dreamed by its inhabitants, Gene thought. And in a way, it was a beautiful thing. He and Claire wanted to be part of that collective dreaming, the most recent reinvention of getting back to the land. And they had every intention of making it work.

Gene and Claire hadn’t moved here blind; they might be idealistic, but they had studied the demographics. Unless one of them went back to practice, chances of finding a job weren’t great. The largest employers in Haeden were not in Haeden at all. They
were a big box store in the next town and a university a couple of towns beyond that. They had also understood that Haeden’s transformation from a self-contained farming village to a service-industry bedroom community on the margins of Appalachia was something that could be felt but was not discussed. A secret shame among friends. Gene and Claire believed all that could be changed. With the right influx of energy. With the right attitude.

Some days the idea of change made Gene almost manic. What surrounded them was intoxicating—so much space, so much opportunity—he felt that with enough time, they would make it their own.

In the summer of 1995, sitting parked in the silver Mazda outside the odd, slightly sloping yellow farmhouse with the car windows rolled down and tears of relief in her eyes, Claire had breathed in the smell of grass and a sweet smell of things gone to seed, and Gene had watched as she surveyed the old clapboard and dormer windows, the overgrown clematis winding up the white pillars and out along the clogged gutter, thick with black decaying leaves. They could not believe their good fortune.

Back in the baby seat, Alice slept surrounded by boxes and backpacks. Everything they owned fit in the two-door.

Sensing Claire’s slight pinch of guilt at having this new home and leaving her patients at the clinic behind, Gene leaned over and kissed her. “We’re going to be way more useful here than anywhere we’ve ever lived,” he said. “We’re fucking DIY, baby, and we’re going to get things done.”

He looked at Claire now, sitting on the counter in bare feet and a long denim skirt, wearing a white tank top screen-printed with the words
CFC 5K RUN
. Claire had strong ropy arms and legs, veins and tendons showing in her feet, in her forearms and hands. He loved the way she carried her otherwise voluptuous body with an unconscious tomboyish grace.

The kitchen smelled like cumin. Pots hung from the ceiling on hooks. A wall of square shelves served as a pantry and dish cupboard.
One of Alice’s little wooden chairs was pushed up next to a pot containing a young avocado tree, its lower branches spread out along the floor, circling the chair. Blocks and wooden animals sat in the dirt at the base of the plant, as well as a notebook, crayons, and binoculars.

Claire looked up and smiled at Gene and Alice, stopped talking to Ross in midsentence. “Oh, good!” she said. “We were
waiting
for the tree. C’mere, tree.” She picked the girl up and hugged her tight. The bag crumpled and tore a little at Alice’s shoulder. Claire looked at her daughter’s rosy face, kissed her. Alice was sweaty, but she still had an otherworldly baby smell: milk, grass, rain on pavement, carnation. Claire put her nose on the girl’s hair and closed her eyes. “Did you see who was here?” she asked quietly into the top of Alice’s head. Ross sometimes made the girl nervous; Claire could always make her feel relaxed, give Alice strength by simply holding her or speaking one quiet sentence in her warm tenor voice.

Alice nodded. Put her forehead on her mother’s chest, wrapped her legs around her waist. “It’s Theophile!” Claire said, smiling, and the dimple in her cheek revealed itself, then disappeared. Alice’s eyes brightened, and Claire put her down.

Theo, who had been waiting, jumped off his chair. “He gave me the magnets,” the boy said, following Alice into the living room. Gene grabbed a Saranac from the refrigerator and stood before his wife for a minute.

“What are you grinning at?” Claire asked him.

He shook his head, touched her waist gently to feel the smooth skin beneath her shirt. “Ross, you need another?” he asked.

“Nah, not right now,” Ross said. “I was just telling Claire about these assholes at the VFW who don’t believe we’re starving the Iraqis to death with these fucking sanctions so we can occupy that region for the next millennium. Christ, what the Christ do you take out a country’s infrastructure for? They’re not stupid. Why the fuck else do you do it?”

“Wait,” Gene said. “I think you told me about this.”

“Nah. That was last Sunday, same assholes. We’re just sheep, man. Especially those bastards at the VFW. You’d think we’d have some idea about what’s going on.”

“‘We’?” Gene asked.

“Yeah. We, goddammit. Did you get up in this country today and drink a cup of coffee?” Ross paused, squinted, and pushed up his sunglasses. “
We
fucking live here, man. I don’t just mean the true believers.” He nodded to himself, and his eyebrows became visible for a moment above the heavy frames of his glasses. “
We!
Me and you and all of us that came here to do the right thing!”

“You were born here,” Gene said.

“Well, I
stayed
here because of the good folks, not ’cause of some assholes who were happy to go off to Vietnam and then happy to see their kids go off to Iraq.”

“Plus, you had all that good weed back then,” Claire said, winking at him.

“That’s another story,” Ross said, laughing. “And don’t think that story’s unrelated, ’cause it isn’t! Everything’s connected, is my point.”

The sun was starting to get lower in the sky. On the turntable, the Motor City 5 scratched out a tinny driving refrain, and Claire smiled broadly. “You know this band, Ross?”

“Can’t say I do.” He stretched his legs out and folded his hands on top of his cap. “But they’re pissed about something.”

She laughed. “We’re going to have to do something about your musical education. This is the album that got me through residency.”

The low ambient hum of insects came to their ears between the thump of the chorus:
Call me animal, that’s my name, call me animal, I’m not ashamed
. Gene admired Claire’s lips as she softly sang along.

Ross and Claire had slipped into silent reveries of their soldier days. This happened sometimes, and Gene would observe them,
blanked out but somehow tied to each other, safe and gone. And still wearing the flag, the badges and scrubs from fights no one even knew had taken place. Fights no one here would believe happened, or care too much about if they did.

Gene sat with their distance and their proximity. Far away now from Vietnam and far away from the secondhand poverty and violence that made Claire what Claire was. Not quite underground, and maybe never able to live at the surface. A mother, whispering in her kitchen; his wife, his oldest friend, mentally leafing through a vespertime hymnal of the Motor City 5 while Ross talked about war. He’d seen it before: MC5 or the Clash or the Ramones used to drown out the din of silence in her head when the image of teenage girls sitting in waiting rooms with their caseworkers got to be too much. He remembered her, drunk and dancing to “Know Your Rights” on the jukebox at the International on First Avenue after work. Remembered her looking up at him, tight-lipped, eyes shining, resilient, proud of her work. Until she had become pregnant with Alice, he had never once seen her cry.